Facebook has just bought some troll repellant in the form of 750 patents for networking, software, and other technologies from IBM according to Bloomberg. If Yahoo relies any of those technologies, Facebook could use the patents to counteract Yahoo’s patent infringement lawsuit against it.
The purchase means Facebook may be in less danger for now, but it doesn’t stop Yahoo from trolling other companies with its vague social networking and advertising patents.

Well, this just in from a dispatch on Capitol Hill: The Senate has passed legislation that will essentially legalize crowdfunding in startups by practically anyone — even your mom. U.S. Senators Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.), and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) collectively introduced the “CROWDFUND Act” (S. 2190) earlier this month, which adds measures to the House of Rep’s now well-known JOBS Act to ensure that companies would be able to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms to raise money from “small-dollar investors.”
While the CROWDFUND Act passed 73-26, and received bipartisan support, as one might expect when the potential for any old investor to enter the well-guarded circle of angel investing (especially in Silicon Valley) comes around, both the JOBS Act and the CROWDFUND Act have been controversial in the business community. Many worry that lowering the barriers to investing in startups could increase the amount of fraud inherent to the process.

TweetDeck, the Twitter client preferred by many of the social network’s power users, has rolled out a major update which brings more of the features that such an audience would require. With the new version, TweetDeck has added the ability for users to create and edit Twitter lists and has added new columns for “Interactions” as well as a stalker-worthy “Activity” feature that lets you track what actions your Twitter friends are taking, too.
Also new is support for inline media previews and an option to use “RT” instead of the previously available “Quote” tweet feature. (Hooray!)

Recommendation engine company Gravity R&D from Hungary started off back in 2006 when the key R&D team behind it participated in a movie recommendation contest for Netflix, improving results by 10 percent. In monetary terms it meant $80-$90 million in additional revenue for Netflix.
After the six-year journey, it has finally broken into the TV space and today Gravity R&D announced that its client, Canadian telecom provider SaskTel, will introduce Gravity R&D ñ powered personalized recommendations to the residential subscribers of its IPTV service Maxô Entertainment Services.

Getty Images’ CEO Jonathan Klein is not concerned about people playing with Getty photos, teenagers using them for school projects, and people putting them up on their personal blogs — or, at the moment, even Pinterest. So when does Getty snap into action? The moment that a website starts running ads alongside those images. As Klein told me in the interview embedded above:

“We’re comfortable with people using our images to build traffic. The point in time when they have a business model, they have to have some sort of license.”

Analytics startup Mixpanel is launching a new product today called Flow, which allows companies to see exactly how users are moving through their websites. In fact, co-founder Suhail Doshi says Flow has already helped Mixpanel fix an all-too-common problem with its login process.
Doshi demonstrated the product for me yesterday. When you use Flow, you see a simple flow chart showing all the visitors to a certain web page, and what pages they clicked to when they left. Clicking on any of the subsequent pages will bring up a new chart showing similar information for the new page.

Discovr, the company behind what’s still one of my all-time favorite mobile app discovery tools, Discovr Apps, is out today with a new application for finding people. Not surprisingly, it’s called Discovr People. The startup, which also has apps in the Music and Movies verticals, is not trying to compete with the trendy “ambient location”/people-stalking apps hitting the scene as of late (like Higlight, Sonar, Glancee, Banjo, etc.), but instead is providing more of a Twitter-based people finder.

Alright. So you have your new iPad. You’re breathing easy knowing that the hectic, crazy part is over and you can simply relax and browse the interwebs on that stunning Retina display.
But not so fast. The iPhone rumor mill starting picking up the pace before the iPad was even announced, and now that big brother tablet is out and about, speculation is revving up. Today, the rumors include a 4.6-inch Retina display on the next-gen iPhone, as well as 4G LTE connectivity.

Amicus, a startup looking to use social connections to make nonprofit fundraising and outreach easier, has raised a seed round of $585,000.
You can see a Amicus’ founders demonstrate the product in the video below, but the basic idea is that fundraising phone calls and emails are a lot more effective when they come from someone you know. If you’ve ever been contacted by some random person asking you to donate to a good cause, you can probably relate. Doubly so if you’ve been the random person.

Once upon a time RIM was the shining star of Canada. Hailing from the Great White North, BlackBerry phones were the country’s dominant smartphone. But times have changed and RIM has not changed with them. That’s a recipe for failure and it seems that based on data compiled by IDC and Bloomberg, Apple shipped more phones in Canada last year than RIM.